The notion is not new.

VLBI observations involving trans-lunar observatories have been made:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spektr-R

and the idea of using very wide baselines has been discussed for decades earlier.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1985lbsa.conf..293B

James Garry Thank you very much for providing the information! It is great to know that people have had this idea for decades.

Jian Yao If there's one thing that I keep (re)learning with time, it's that good ideas tend to have been had already.

:(

Note that different pipelines created images with different resolutions so they interpolated the low-res ones up to the high resolution, merged them, then deliberately blurred the result to avoid producing a final image that had better resolution than could be justified. Future algorithm refinement may well improve the resolution even from the existing data. There are also new observatories joining the team soon.

George Dishman This is good to know. I agree that people should present the result that could be justified, even though they have a "better" result. Thank you for providing the information and I look forward to a better AND justified result.

Dear Jian Yao,

Much of what is presented to the public is intended to convey only an appreciation of what has been achieved and its significance, it is not a justification. To see the degree to which the result can be trusted and used in further analysis, you need to read the six scientific papers that form the real release, they are listed at the bottom of this page. Have fun ;-)

https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_EHT

"And it wasn’t until 1967, 12 years after Einstein’s death in 1955, that these astrophysical singularities became known as “black holes”—a term coined by American physicist John A. Wheeler during a conference in New York." https://www.history.com/news/black-holes-albert-einstein-theory-relativity-space-time

On the question of "Black Hole", Albert Einstein (in whose name this big fraud is promoted) himself in a published a paper (link Below) emphatically dismissed the possibility of "Back Holes" even in theory! The following is a copy of his conclusion at the end of this mathematically rich and lengthy publication: "The essential result of this investigation is a clear understanding as to why the "Schwarzschild singularities" do not exist in physical reality. Although the theory given here treats only clusters whose particles move along circular paths it does not seem to be subject to reasonable doubt that mote general cases will have analogous results. The "Schwarzschild singularity" does not appear for the reason that matter cannot be concentrated arbitrarily. And this is due to the fact that otherwise the constituting particles would reach the velocity of light.

This investigation arose out of discussions the author conducted with Professor H. P. Robertson and with Drs. V. Bargmann and P. Bergmann on the mathematical and physical significance of the Schwarzschild singularity. The problem quite naturally leads to the question, answered by this paper in the negative, as to whether physical models are capable of exhibiting such a singularity." Albert Einstein. https://www.cscamm.umd.edu/people/faculty/tiglio/GR2012/Syllabus_files/EinsteinSchwarzschild.pdf

So, what was "discovered" recently is probably the "smile" (left behind) of a Black Cheshire Cat while the Cat itself vanished (if it existed at all)!

Please note: This link to Einstein's work was accessible before when I discussed and referred to this publication by Einstein in other RG forums. But it now seems that any online access is not available or blocked!